Members of the ASTI family gathered last week in Cali, Colombia to review the results of three years of joint work: new and updated data on agricultural research capacity and investment for 27 countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region.

ASTI focal points from 14 Latin American countries and one collaborator from the Anglophone Caribbean (representing 10 island states) came together to discuss their experiences with data collection in their countries, strategies for communicating key messages to policymakers and other stakeholders, and forward-looking innovations for maintaining and expanding ASTI data collection and analysis in the region.

Photo credit: Wilmer Gutierrez/IFPRI

Meeting attendees took a break from their deliberations to plant five trees on the CIAT campus –both an effort to compensate for the carbon footprint of the workshop travel and a symbol of ASTI’s hopes and plans for an expanded “forest” of data collection and analysis in the region.